Horacio Castellanos Moya, Drew Hayden Taylor, Patrick Taylor

James Grainger is a books columnist for the Toronto Star and the author of The Long Slide. He is also the Editor in Chief of Torontoist's new books site, Books@Torontoist.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras, but grew up in El Salvador. He has lived in Guatemala, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain and Germany. He has published eight novels, which have been translated into a number of languages. His novel Senselessness was published to critical acclaim in 2008. Moya currently lives in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He reads from Dance with Snakes, set in an El Salvador returning to peace after more than a decade of war.

Drew Hayden Taylor is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations. A journalist, scriptwriter, and award-winning playwright, Taylor has worked on more than 17 documentaries exploring Native experience. He is also the author of non-fiction and a novel for young adults. He presents his first novel for adults, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, a story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger, in a sleepy Anishnawbe community.

Born in Northern Ireland, Patrick Taylor (Canada/Ireland) received a medical education in Ulster. He has written numerous medical journals, including 170 papers and six textbooks. In the mid-90s he started writing fiction, and his novels include: Pray for us Sinners, The Apprenticeship of Doctor Laverty, Now and in the Hour of our Death, the New York Times bestselling An Irish Country Doctor, and An Irish Country Village. He presents An Irish Country Girl, the Ireland-set story of housekeeper Mrs. Kinky Kincaid.

An Irish Country Girl tells the story of the girl who will someday become Mrs. Kinky Kincaid – the housekeeper of Patrick Taylor’s New York Times bestselling An Irish Country Doctor. A precocious girl on the cusp of womanhood, she has a head full of dreams, a heart open to romance, and something more: a gift for seeing beyond the ordinary into the mystic realms of faeries, spirits, and even the dreaded Banshee, whose terrifying wail she hears on a snowy night in 1922. An Irish Country Girl chronicles this young girl’s journey into womanhood – a journey no less full of mystery for one who is blessed with the sight.

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, an unemployed sociologist assumes the identity of a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet. Also living in the Chevrolet are four poisonous snakes, and with these venomous new accomplices, the sociologist soon unleashes a reign of terror on the city. Dance with Snakes – translated from the Spanish by Lee Paula Springer – is a macabre, high-speed romp in which violence and comedy become barely distinguishable, and the action raises questions about social exclusion, the role of the media, and the tenderness of relations among those on society’s margins.

In a sleepy Anishnawbe community in central Ontario, chief Maggie Second is struggling to settle a land dispute, and to come to terms with the fact that her mother is on her deathbed. When a mysterious white stranger arrives riding a vintage 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle, only the dying mother knows who he is. When she summons him during her final farewells, she also charges him with a mission to help the people she is leaving behind.